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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26626162">Azrā'īl</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Albrecht_Starkarm/pseuds/Albrecht_Starkarm'>Albrecht_Starkarm</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Black Lagoon (Anime &amp; Manga)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Abuse, Cruelty, Metaphysics, Misanthropy, Psychosexual Brutality, Psychosis, Soviet-Afghan War, Theology, Violence, vengeance</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 07:00:03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>8,456</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26626162</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Albrecht_Starkarm/pseuds/Albrecht_Starkarm</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>"Teach me," the stupid boy says.  Teach me, like it's something that can be put in words.</p><p>"Teach me to kill."  He pleads for it, prostrates himself like a child.  The boy doesn't know the first thing about the deed, about the black grease and the empty eyes.</p><p>But maybe he can learn.  After all, Balalaika is its priestess, a prelate of carnage with a wolf's fangs and eyes bleeding pitch.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Balalaika/Boris (Black Lagoon)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Azrā'īl</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Another weird one, as always.</p><p>Why do I even add that anymore?</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Teach me. It's an easy thing to ask when you're a student.</p><p>"Teach me." She laughed. Laughed 'cause it was just so easy for the student to ask. <em>Oh, master, teach me! Teach me this, teach me that, but most importantly just teach me.</em> The plea on the lips too soft for a boy's, but he was a boy, anyway.</p><p>Man.</p><p>Boy.</p><p>Where was the dividing line? Was there just some seam you hit when anybody'd just divine it? Yeah, this guy's a man; he ain't a boy.</p><p>Was he a boy?</p><p>He looked like a goddamn boy. That was for damn sure. The way his lips still tightened up like a scalded chicken's skin, just for a flash of a micron of a second, so vanishingly small you couldn't even put a number or a time to it, but she saw it all the same.</p><p>"Teach me." He was on his knees. It was fuckin' funny, the way he got on his knees, just like a good Jap. The hair was black and looked soft, soft like a child's, like everything else.</p><p>Except the shoulders. The shoulders'd gotten thick with toil. It was hardening, she thought, just the way it was supposed to be. Victorian that way. What'd they call it? Improving. Everything was Improving. For your moral fiber. Your righteousness. Your integrity.</p><p>She smiled, swung one leg over the other, and then traded them with a smoothness like painting oil on velvet. The cigar was a dead branch between lips she daubed with a soft pink. Dared somebody to say shit.</p><p>Every morning, she wore the same pink, and every night it came off untouched, without a single word. Light came saffron through the window, overheated like everything else in the city of the damned. Like everything there, it was stained with tinges of red, of pink, a tightening ring of something sulfurous. Horns were a shrill symphony through even the thick double-glazed panes, all of it tattooed with words like Ballistic, polycarbonate, that was what it was, plastic better than anything else when there was enough of it.</p><p>They opened. She ordered them to find something she could open, even with the Big Guy with his face zippered with that scar almost from ear to ear sparing the eyes with their flat black exposing nothing except there was nothing to expose. Saying her Praporshchik was taciturn was like saying the old mountains creeping gray up into the heavens with their faraway glitter of white ice were tall, were ancient.</p><p>He was as old as the earth and like her they both belonged there. Fate gave them an ultimatum. She remembered talking to one of the Arabs they were supposed to bring back to Battalion for interrogation, but that wasn't gonna happen. Not when the dushman peeled the skin from the meat and flayed the meat from the bone and fucked you to death while they spiked you with knives, tested their pulwars on you, used the sweat and tears dribbling down your face for target practice just to give you a flash of hope and make no mistake, you leathery sumbitches, it doesn't matter how tough you are, how many tours you've been through, you will sweat, and you will cry.</p><p>Boris wasn't good at that kinda talk. She left it to Mikhail, guy looked he coulda been Boris' brother, except Boris didn't have a brother. Far as she knew, Boris only had a sister, and she was pretty in the way he was handsome. Larger-than-life, a grace and elegance like a beautiful monster, a behind-the-lines kind of goddess who might not have had what it took to stomp the crusty ice and dust that turned itself into its own dirty dun horizons in shit-squishers but had gone into the KGB.</p><p>She respected his sister. Daria. That was her name. She was a good killer, Boris told her, something offhand the way he always spoke, like language degraded what you were talking about the more words you put to it.</p><p>The room was degradation. It was decadence. She hated it which was why she kept it just that way. Old guy, what was his name, a Polkovnik, it was stupefying the way the brain worked, wasn't it, you could remember what you had for breakfast- kasha and a glass of milk, milk, that rare beautiful privilege rich and ripe and sticky-cold sliding down her throat- the morning after your twelfth birthday, but that Polkovnik- that was it.</p><p>Konstantinov.</p><p>Polkovnik Konstantinov, the quietest guy she'd ever met, so quiet Boris sounded like a machine-gun chatterer next to him, the guy who'd chosen her and another out of the lineup that afternoon when they'd stood around in their cadets' costumes all stiff-backed, boots bulled and polished 'til they burned black under the stark light melting them all to the deck on a torpid July afternoon with the wasplike Mils spanking the air overhead and Antonovs' soft moan coming and leaving with a rhythm like an irregular heartbeat, some of them roaring so low over the strip it felt like a bear grumbling down in your gut.</p><p>Polkovnik Konstantinov didn't have a given name, she figured. He might've had one once but it turned into <em>Polkovnik</em> and the guy was less a human being and more concentric iron bands holding together a devil, a spirit the way the her great-uncle the old trapper told her about the Devils of The Forest.</p><p>She loved Great-Uncle Semyon. He talked like the sailor he was after he'd marched six hundred kilometers through snow and heat to reach a recruitment depot out of Siberia to volunteer for the Great Patriotic War and was told he was too old.</p><p>She knew it was a lie. They weren't even turning away schoolgirls willing to sit behind an artillery piece's gunshield and stare down Fascist devils with flat eyes burned cold by the inferno turning cities behind them to ash and their future to dust, innocence magicked into invincibility.</p><p>He was too old, Semyon said, so he joined the Navy instead and he was tougher than all the young guys, ten, twenty, <em>thirty</em> years, Senyon would flourish it with three of his scarred fingers uplifted at her when she'd sit in his thrall for hours next to the fireplace with its bright yellow pops and floating orange sparks giving him a tenebrist melodrama like a Gentileschi painting.</p><p>Thirty years younger than me, and they couldn't run like I could, couldn't march like I could, couldn't pull ropes like I could. Why, once, I lifted an anchor off the deck all by myself, 'cause I'd never seen one'a them newfangled machines and figured: Why wait? They said: Semyon, that anchor weighs two tons, but did I care?</p><p>No, I didn't care. Feel this muscle, Lena. Feel it. Yes? Do you feel?</p><p>She'd reach out and his biceps bulged like Boris', his forearms were steel braid, yeah, Great-Uncle Semyon was an authentic giant crushed down into a body no taller than her grandmother's but about as thick as he was tall.</p><p>They said they didn't have a uniform my size, so I had to make my own out of an old sail.</p><p>Did I care?</p><p>No, I didn't care. I wanted only to serve the Workers' Revolution.</p><p>He had the routine down, told her to take hold of his beard.</p><p>Pull on my beard, Lena.</p><p>I can't do that, Uncle Semyon-</p><p>Pull on my beard, girl!</p><p>Semyon's eyes got wild like Rasputin's and the beard was thicker than wool, yellowed with tobacco from the old burlwood pipe he packed with makhorka reeking like tar and burning newspaper and charred honey. Semyon said he'd pulled out the root with his own hands- these hands, these very hands- because it was breaking his old horse's back, and he thought he'd give the mare a rest.</p><p>She served our family so well, you see, it would've been unfair to make her work so long like a Capitalist. So I buckled down and like any good Communist proved will triumphs over all.</p><p>And she'd pull on Semyon's beard and he'd stand up, and she'd be dangling, laughing while he swung her around left and right before she dropped back on the scuffed old wood next to the fireplace's dressed white stone.</p><p>See? They told me to shave my beard, but it broke every razor they had, dulled every pair of scissors. They came at me with tree cutters but it broke those, too, so they had to write a special regulation letting Semyon keep his beard. It stopped bullets, you know. After every battle, I had at least twenty Fascist bullets to wring out.</p><p>She always half-believed everything he said. He told her, told her folks, it'd just be a waste to left such a tough girl rot on the vine without seeing military service. She won't be no PPZh, Semyon told her dad, staring up at him and looking down on him at the same time, at his pale Western skin, the way his eyes had a softness in them she always remembered peering down into her crèche, that voice a shiver in her ears, Lena, what a miracle it is you're here. I'll never be a total atheist as long as you're here.</p><p>Her mother <em>was</em> an atheist. She remembered that. Remembered Svetlana, the tall woman with the silvery-blonde hair with its wavy ripples down her back laughing about all the morons clinging to their ikons, to their gods, use them for kindling, goddamn them!</p><p>Svetlana never held her when she was a girl. She remembered that. She said it bred weakness. Why do you want a daughter still clinging to her mother's tit when she's thirty? Do you want that, Nikolai?</p><p>She'd talk down to her dad, too, and it made it worse she was taller than Nikolai was by a good two or three inches. She was a giantess, far as she thought.</p><p>It was Svetlana's reflection she wanted to see in the mirror once she hit nine, ten, eleven, always lunging ahead, always sucking down air brittle and too bright with an algid sun that gave off no light at six, seven in the morning on the track when the firs melting white with snow shivered and shimmied with the windblown ice ripping papery stripes off the poplars and birches standing naked, angry skeletal sentinels around the Young Pioneers' track.</p><p>No one would be out there with her. Not even the athletes they'd made the second they stepped in, the long-legged gazelles with the black beguiling eyes and soft skin they'd chose as favorites for gymnastics or swimming or the beefy kids already packed with muscle and gristle at nine, ten.</p><p>Only Lena alone. Only the girl with the hair streaming behind her like a pennant, running, and running, and running on the macadam flexing and creaking in the chill rolling with ice and slopping with sweat gluing the shirt to her shoulders and neck and the small of her back and sweats to legs starting to get hard chiseled planes like Svetlana's in the summer.</p><p>Sitting behind a rifle with Semyon or her mother, both of them marksmen. She didn't really know <em>what</em> Svetlana did but her dad worked at the Toystore and she'd see his eyes flat and starry like he wasn't really seeing anything when he came back in the evening and shrugged out of his greatcoat flecked with bits of snow and ice or eased off his jacket and would sit alone at the kitchen table in the apartment they had alone in the big microrayon with its blocky faces and neatly-ordered windows and crabby ductwork sometimes you'd hear whole family melodramas come through when it was still and lonely in the evening and the sky sank blue and misty into black.</p><p>Sometimes Nikolai would say nothing for an hour, two, three. It didn't matter what anyone else did. You could walk around him, could sit at the table and set out tea, could even have a full meal and Nikolai with his squared-off bristly mustache going gray at the edges like his temples, ash invading auburn, and contemplate the floor.</p><p>Once she heard her parents when they probably thought she wasn't home. When she lay in the bedroom she had alone and knew she was gifted to have, staring at the ceiling, fingers wrapped around the old copy of <em>The Possessed</em> Semyon had given her and worn at the edges, some of the pages fine as cigarette paper frayed, but the bold angry arrogant words still black and stark under the yellow light creeping out of the Korean lamp she had on her bed stand next to a West German radio.</p><p>The Korean lamp was cloaked in jagged tessellations of exquisite color and when it was dark she'd snap off every other light and turn it on and watch it roll across the wall when she spun the fragile tapering shade with a fingertip.</p><p>It was a small room. They always were. Even party bosses' kids had small rooms. It was hers. The floor was hers and the walls were hers and the window peering down sixty feet or maybe a thousand into the courtyard with its cottony snow lumps and scraggly half-dead grasses in the buildings' shadow, that was hers, too.</p><p>Hearing her parents meant they were almost screaming at each other as loudly as you could.</p><p>
  <em>Goddammit, Svetlana, can't you just listen?!</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I am listening. Listening doesn't mean <b>agreeing</b>, Nikolai Grigorevich-</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Don't you use that on me. Not your fucking husband, Svetlana-</em>
</p><p>
  <em>What kind of husband are you? You're a better wife, you fucking pussy-</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Don't you <b>dare</b> talk to me like that.</em>
</p><p><em>Going to use your hands like a <b>real</b> man, Nikolai Grigorevich?</em> She'd never heard her mother laugh like that. It was a laugh that sent her gut bungeeing to her knees. The kind of laugh she knew women used to turn men to little boys.</p><p>
  <em>You don't want to know what these hands do, Svetlana. You don't want to know. You might think you're- you're hot shit, working with the GRU, but what the fuck do you know? You're an amateur; you're a goddamn governess to whores-in-training for limp-dicked generals.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Amateur?!</em>
</p><p>That was what caught her mom's ear, she knew.</p><p>No one could shoot like Svetlana. She knew that. Even Uncle Semyon said he'd never seen anyone, man or woman or devil, drive a bullet to its target like Svetlana.</p><p>She has the hands and eyes of Death Herself, Lena, Uncle Semyon would laugh when he said it. He told her he was prouder than proud to have a niece who could shoot like that.</p><p>You see, Lena, the time for old bears like me, it's at an end. Oh, might! might will always be in demand, but men with their muscles?</p><p>Uncle Semyon laughed, shook his head.</p><p>Give me ten women who can shoot like your mother and we will take Vashington and mount President whatshisname, George Vashington, Semyon didn't especially care about the last two hundred years, the President was and would always be George Vashington because that's the only one he ever bothered learning, we will mount his head on the General Secretary's mantelpiece.</p><p>
  <em>You say I'm an <b>amateur</b>, Nikolai Grigorevich? Fuck your amateurism. Fuck your man's hands. You can't even touch me right. You think I'm impressed you can get answers out of scared yids and decadent Yankee spies? Please. You don't bring me a tenth of the pleasure those whores-in-training do.</em>
</p><p>She knew Nikolai hit her mother at exactly that second. There was a silence and then Svetlana started laughing that hideous laugh again.</p><p>
  <em>Do it again, Nikolai Grigorevich. You're not even as strong as my mother, much less my father. How are you going to mark me and show this governess to whores-in-training you're the big man if you can't hit like he could? I'd rather suck his cock than yours any day-</em>
</p><p>Nikolai hit her again. And again. And again until Svetlana was just laughing. It got bitterer and bitterer until Lena just wanted to start laughing, too, so Svetlana would know she was home. And then the quiet creaking she knew like muscle memory. Svetlana's growl like a feral animal; the way their bed groaned on the floor and its headboard cantered against the wall, faster and faster.</p><p>How her dad was silent the whole time and Svetlana wouldn't shut up.</p><p>
  <em>Shouldn't you do better than the whores I have to train, Nikolai? A-ah, ah, that's... Too slow, you're going too slow, why must you always be so <b>nice</b>? You'd better find another girl to fuck; maybe a ballerina like the Tsar-</em>
</p><p>Svetlana wouldn't even admit Lena could hold a rifle 'til she'd already had six years with Uncle Semyon, the man grown older, every year older, but his eyes like an owl's penetrating and sure even while his forehead got blotchy and his hair shrank away up his scalp like a retreating tide and his beard showed the snow in summer.</p><p>'til she could hit every target at six hundred meters with the five rounds in the old Mosin rifle's magazine with its iron sights. 'til she could stamp five neat holes in a target's head.</p><p>Then Svetlana settled down on the bed's edge at six one evening when Lena was wilting, tired, gut screeching at her with every month's predictable misery. Svetlana was always beautiful; more than anything, that's what she was. Long, fine, all the exquisite shapes packed in her blouses and trim skirts and wrapped glistening with nylon and stalking on sharp-pointed heels.</p><p>She had her hair back. She reeked like sex, Lena knew after that. Her dad wasn't even home and Svetlana's nails were short-trimmed, buffed, hardened with polish's watery glow.</p><p>Lena wanted to fucking <em>die</em>. If you could buy it from that monthly nightmare, then she shoulda already been chiseling out a headstone. Cringing, arms pulling a fitful bit of heat from a water bottle against her gut, door half-open with a Shostakovitch symphony stirring softly through the radio and all of it coming fitfully like the ghost of conversations floating on wind.</p><p>Svetlana was holding something when she opened her eyes. Caught the sweat on her mother's neck, the little red bows of lipstick on her collarbone. The steel and old weathered wood still kept perfectly polished like staring into a river's weak-tea waters between its banks giving off a ripe cold smell of mud.</p><p>A scope's slender tube.</p><p>"Do you know what this is, Lena?" Svetlana's fingertips ghosted down the rifle's body.</p><p>
  <em>Yes, mama. It's a 91/30 with a PE scope.</em>
</p><p>It wasn't like one of the Young Pioneers' AV or even Uncle Semyon's old infantry rifles. It even had its matching numbers electropencilled with that uneasy hand belonging to some long-forgotten tradesman on its rough metal face.</p><p>"Good. Now get to know it like your own body. You're not going to sleep tonight. Touch it. Fondle it. Masturbate to it." Svetlana's voice was hard.</p><p>Serious.</p><p>"Fall in love with it. Tomorrow morning, if you're still awake at six, I'll teach you how to kill with it."</p><p>Lena was still awake, eyes sharp like her mother's, like Uncle Semyon's.</p><p>It was hot. She remembered that. Midsummer at some point, maybe July, August. But they drove. And drove. And drove. Svetlana at the trim boxy Lada's wheel and slanting away from the city lurking big and eternal and refusing to shrink in the rear-view 'til it finally did, 'til it melted into nothing but gray fog and vague shapes and was finally gone, 'til the rumpled road rattled under the tires, 'til the sun charred off the mist and mantled high into the sky and was already sinking off its throne with a practiced surrender.</p><p>Then they stopped next to a deserted old field nested between trees that showed the wind, a confection of lumpy little hillocks scattered around like fistfuls of sand in a divine model and scraggly high grasses and the quiet creak and pop and crack of ten thousand animals rustling through the undergrowth.</p><p>It was hot. Svetlana hadn't given Lena any water, anything at all. No food since yesterday and she'd been happy not to have to sit at the table and push around her meal left and right across the bone-white china in some demented parody of the act of dining and now there was only the sound of her gut digesting itself.</p><p>Her eyes were misted with oily stripes of blue light in the inferno.</p><p>Svetlana ordered her on her belly on the grass.</p><p>Lena didn't have the rifle.</p><p>
  <em>A sniper's most essential discipline is camouflage and fieldcraft. Shooting is less than one-percent of a sniper's craft. You're going to disappear on me, Lena.</em>
</p><p>Svetlana told her it was hide-and-seek. Except Svetlana was cradling the big old rifle against her big chest. Wore an old workman's clothes; a pair of coveralls so filthy no cleaning would take and a rough shirt and had her hair knotted in that bitch bun Lena always dreading seeing.</p><p>It meant there'd be some fun new game for them to play that always involved sweat and screaming meat.</p><p>Svetlana yanked the rifle's bolt, slipped a drab faded old brassy round into the chamber, and threw it closed.</p><p>She had eyes that never blinked like a dead animal's, like death's.</p><p>"Hide."</p><p>Lena ran. And ran. Scrabbled out into the field and splashed through a shallow little runnel and slipped off into the woods.</p><p>Her mother called off the numbers. She had four minutes.</p><p>240 seconds.</p><p>What can you do in 240 seconds?</p><p>Finish a sandwich?</p><p>A glass of water?</p><p>Write a few sentences, maybe? A paragraph? Even a page if the inspiration shrieks through your fingers.</p><p>Lena barely reached the forest's edge before a bullet etched a crack in her brain she could still pull up like it was just about to happen, a flat snap describing the kind of horror no one knows 'til they taste it.</p><p>There weren't words.</p><p>What?</p><p><em>Jesus, my mom just shot at me</em>?</p><p>That wasn't it. Wasn't nearly enough.</p><p>Svetlana's voice echoed off the trees with the report.</p><p>
  <em>That was too easy. I could kill you like a paraplegic deer. You need to try harder if you're going to wear my name, Lena!</em>
</p><p>Another shot crackled six inches over the girl's head, slammed into a tree behind her.</p><p>
  <em>Far too easy.</em>
</p><p>Lena stood there on the deck at Ryazan and waited, and waited, and waited.</p><p>There were no other women. She listened to the men's bullshit, all the sniggering, all the ostentatious half-whispers, <em>Jesus, why ya think she's here, Ivan Anatolyevich?</em></p><p>
  <em>Think she's here to put a boot up our asses or make it worth our while?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Christ, 's a two-dick mouth at least.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Who you wanna share it with?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Hey, mine's big as three. Think it'll fit? Hurhurhur.</em>
</p><p>Polkovnik Konstantinov was the induction master for all the VDV careerists, all the contract troops, the guys weren't just short-timers. The field was a controlled bedlam, choppers throbbing off the deck and settling back, the Antonovs rumbling up and down the tarmac dancing and popping with ten thousand points of light.</p><p>He stood there stiff-backed with his empty-eyed adjutant with the lips that were just a thin seam for words and watched and waited.</p><p>And waited.</p><p>No one knew just what the fuck Polkovnik Konstantinov wanted but some of the guys were starting to drop off. Just a half-second, but it was enough, kept 'em at-attention and if it lapsed Konstantinov would turn to his empty-eyed adjutant and nod. Lena could trace out the words on his bloodless lips, <em>Make a note</em>.</p><p>The spooky-eyed adjutant with his hair so fine it looked like glass wires crushed low on his scalp ordered everyone off the field, what're you waiting for, goddammit, back to your quarters to wait!</p><p>Lena didn't leave. She stood there still and only one other guy was willing to wait next to her. Light sank lower and lower over the flat sun-charred field, some guy named Aleksandr, the one guy who'd said nothing the whole time, either, just waited with a cadet's insignia on his shoulders.</p><p>Konstantinov barely blinked. He wore his blue beret like a badge of office, always tucked into his right shoulder epaulet band. He had hands that looked like they could crack a lobster's claws bare, scarred and scraped. They unfolded the beret and set it squarely on a head that looked as pitiless as everything else, sandy stubble on his sun-darkened scalp, big mustache drooping low, his jaw as close to a square as you were gonna get.</p><p>Konstantinov stepped up to both of them and he wore the sun red like blood around his shoulders.</p><p>
  <em>Just what the fuck do you think you're doing standing on my airfield?</em>
</p><p>"Waiting, Comrade Polkovnik!" Lena liked the way Aleksandr's voice still sounded like hers: Loud, trying to fill the infinite dome of empty airless space around them.</p><p>
  <em>Waiting for what? Weren't you told to leave?!</em>
</p><p>"You didn't order us, Comrade Polkovnik!"</p><p>Konstantinov nodded. Turned to his spooky-eyed adjutant and this time said something so quietly and discreetly even Lena couldn't catch it.</p><p>The next morning the other assholes were gone 'cept for Aleksandr and Lena. Konstantinov still had them assemble at the airfield under the rattling Mils and screeching Antonovs and inspected the whole phantom parade like he had ten thousand men instead of just two candidates.</p><p>And then turned to them.</p><p>"You're probably wondering who I was inspecting, yes?"</p><p>
  <em>Yes, Comrade Polkovnik!</em>
</p><p>"The ghosts of men's pride. Pride is death. Arrogance is death. Complacency is death. Belief is death. Life is death. Both of you are dead, as far as I'm concerned. You will die in time. Even if you live to be a hundred and bring ten thousand new paratroopers to my beloved Airborne, you are dead to me.</p><p>"You must die before you can wear the beret."</p><p>They died.</p><p>Ten million times.</p><p>Gravity ate them and only Soviet-built canopies embalmed their bodies.</p><p>Muj bullets tore their flesh and broke their bones but death stayed her hand.</p><p>"Azrā'īl. Do you know Azrā'īl?" The Arab was a handsome young guy, probably no more than thirty, an Algerian they thought, and his skin was like caramel under the wavering camp lantern lights. Ten of them, Lena remembered.</p><p>The damnedest thing.</p><p>He was gorgeous, she thought. Felt something sinister and poisonous climb up her heels and her ankles and tingle in her knees. Even with Boris in the same cave, some filthy asshole in the earth banked by sheer cliffs traced with long spiraling paths the fuckin' muj fell off some of the time, the thin edges that'd catch your boots and send you flailing and groping at the few thin half-dead shrubs and roots worming with their own relentless defiance out of the living rock.</p><p>There were two other troopers in the cave with them. They stayed back, eyes flat, emptied out from exhaustion, staring out of the cave's mouth and into one of the storms that came and went like the end of the world, wind reedy moaning down the cavern like a bottle's neck and lightning's blue-white sizzle reflected ten thousand times down the cliffs' faces and thunder's jungle drums.</p><p>There were other paratroopers outside. A whole fucking company.</p><p>She was their Kapitan, after all.</p><p>It wasn't pulling rank. It was the wet messy work you usually drew like polishing a shitter with your tongue unless you'd lost a good friend.</p><p>Even then, not everybody wanted it.</p><p>They called her Balalaika then. It wasn't warm and tongue-in-cheek; it wasn't loving.</p><p>They called her that 'cause it was her rifle. The one tucked against the corner. <em>Her</em> fucking Dragunov and if anybody touched it they better have had a goddamned fabulous reason more compelling than just <em>oh fuck we're getting overrun and my Kalash just ran dry</em>.</p><p>Faraway lightning gave the world long distorted shadows.</p><p>The Arab muj was stripped down to his shorts. Nothing else except the frag scars' shallow puckers on his shoulders and neck and a few on his face looking like kiddie stars, all perfectly neat and symmetrical.</p><p>A longer zipper down his back.</p><p>His hands were delicate. Like a woman's, really, she thought, too fine even with all the calluses and rough edges. They didn't even twitch, knotted with rope on a camp stool with crusty black stains on green canvas were giving no real hope about what was gonna happen.</p><p>His hair was soft.</p><p>Black.</p><p>Silky when she brushed her fingers through it. Just a little stroke like a lover's, almost. The kinda affection after, what, a year, two years out in the field, that'd turn any guy's any <em>human</em>'s skin tingling and crazed.</p><p>Starvation in the big inky eyes wreathed with the kinda lashes women paid for or killed for if they couldn't pay.</p><p>He had a big cock. She could see it through his shorts, rumpled shadow like smuggling a cobra.</p><p>American boxers. Fruit of The Loom.</p><p>Official undergarment of the Decadent Capitalist Counterrevolution, she guessed.</p><p>The Arab muj started before she could even ask him question one.</p><p>"Do you know Azrā'īl?" Lena shook her head no, she had no idea what the fuck he was talking about. Some of that nutty Afghan shit, right, all the backwater divines and bleary-eyed hashed-up mystics with their creepy mumbling into beards long enough they might've been growing 'em when Methuselah was still a little brother.</p><p>Boris said nothing. He had a talent for that.</p><p>"You don't know?" The Arab muj just laughed.</p><p>She didn't like that.</p><p>Slipped out a knife she'd swapped a sixteenth of heroin for to some black-market trader back in Kandahar. It was Taiwanese, the guy said, hell, it's so strong an' it'll stay so sharp you could shave rocks all day and trim your short hairs with it an' not git a nick.</p><p>Honest.</p><p>It was a vicious knife. Didn't matter if the bullshit was true. Blackened with a pale stripe of an edge had been whetted 'til it almost took a blood sample when she creased it with a thumb.</p><p>She nodded. Dumped the heroin in the guy's filthy fingers and got a <em>salaam</em> for her troubles.</p><p>And the knife. It was out now. It fell like water from her right palm to her left, the left to her right, sizing up what he needed but could stand to live without for at least a few hours.</p><p>"How can you not know about Azrā'īl? Aren't we all Her servants?" The Arab muj kept laughing and wouldn't stop. Shook his head.</p><p>When she striped his cheek, he just smiled.</p><p>
  <em>Harder, won't you? She won't even hear my prayers if you're too nice with me!</em>
</p><p>She felt the look Boris was tattooing on her back.</p><p>
  <em>I don't like this guy. He's cracked. Let's dump him back at Battalion and let him be somebody else's problem, huh?</em>
</p><p>But she didn't wanna stop. Didn't wanna stop when the tears betrayed the weakness her mother always told her was all you had your parents to thank for.</p><p>The goddamned disgusting weakness in your body.</p><p>The campfire snapping and crackling while they sat around it, only Lena and Svetlana, Svetlana's skin a canvas for the swirling orange hell and Lena's arms and legs emptied out and the fatty tinned meat greasy on her chin and lips and she still sucked it down raw, slurped the lard like a feral animal, dumped the water with its halazone death from its battered old aluminum canteen down her throat.</p><p>She didn't have a mouth.</p><p>The Arab muj wasn't cracked.</p><p>She asked his name and he said it didn't matter, only Azrā'īl ever knew their names. They were all consecrated to Her the day they were born.</p><p>All of them.</p><p>All of us.</p><p>You.</p><p>Me.</p><p><em>Everybody</em>!</p><p>"Your folks taught you that, right?" The Arab muj never let the tears in his voice when she peeled the skin off his shoulder, bared the naked meat, the bone's yellowy shapes. When she popped off one finger, and then another, and then another?</p><p>It'd been four and a half fucking hours and he said nothing. Boris wasn't squeamish; he just got bored. Packed it off to watch the cavern's mouth with the other grunts.</p><p>The Arab muj's voice crept in her ears, that soft sweet voice in English. They both spoke it with an accent.</p><p>Hers was husky and hoarse and his was thick and syrupy.</p><p>It sounded like a lover's voice. The way it came and went, subdued private murmurs between them like notes passed in class.</p><p>"What do you mean?" She was past threatening the Arab muj, trying to show him what a hardass she was.</p><p>If they didn't think you were hard when you cauterized a finger stump cracked off and weeping blood like a wet branch with your cigarette lighter, nothing was gonna do it.</p><p>"The way you are."</p><p>"What do you mean?" She was smearing the blood and meat-mulch off her knife. Wondering where to put it next.</p><p>"You don't wince, ah- Kapitan? I'm sorry. I don't know your name." She figured it wouldn't be a problem.</p><p>He'd learn and she'd learn tomorrow if their souls could fly.</p><p>"Vladilena."</p><p>"What a strange name."</p><p>"My parents are true Communists." That wasn't really her name, of course. "I'm named after Vladimir Lenin."</p><p>Only the gray men with their gray faces and gray blood shuffling around paperwork knew the real one.</p><p>And her family. And Boris.</p><p>The way his rough voice and rough hands and the lips softer than anyone else except maybe his sister would believe cradled it.</p><p>But that was something private, a secret known the only way secrets really could be: By the dead.</p><p>Even then, Svetlana and her dad called her Lena. Sofiya, Svetlana said, was too fucking <em>soft</em>. It was name for a girl with two poods of fat in her tits and hair she always wore done-up like so and long red nails. Her granddad wanted the name for her because that was her great-grandmother's name, and he was an Oedipal minefield. He was willing to live with Sofiya Vladilena.</p><p>The Arab muj nodded.</p><p>"That's not your name." He gave her that smile again. "Just like my name isn't really Hassan."</p><p>"But that's the one your parents gave you, right, Hassan?"</p><p>Hassan, the Arab muj, he laughed.</p><p>"But my parents aren't real, you see," he told her. "Oh, they gave birth to me, but my real mother is Azrā'īl."</p><p>"Who's this Azrā'īl? I thought all you muj were Islam freaks."</p><p>"I've looked past it." It didn't even sound like a confession or even an admission. Just a statement of fact. "Islam is Submission, you see, but this is something more. Bigger than even Allah. Bigger than even the Prophet, peace be upon him."</p><p>She traced out the words with him.</p><p>He smiled. Kept smiling when she took another finger and charred the stump closed with her lighter's shrill steely <em>click</em>, the flint's wheeze.</p><p>The crackle in her ears and the stink curling in her nose.</p><p>"Azrā'īl is where we're all going. It's the end, you see?"</p><p>Hassan's laughter didn't have the manic brain-cracked edge other guys' got. And the women when they fell through sanity's frayed edges and it hit them they didn't even belong in their bodies. You didn't own it.</p><p>You didn't even rent it.</p><p>It was possession, too.</p><p>And you could leave it with a blink.</p><p>"The end, huh? What? Of the war-"</p><p>"Of the world! Oh, your army gave me a beautiful vision. The bombers. The gunships. But it was more than that. The fire and flame and blood and metal. They let me see, sister." He hadn't called her that before. "Let me see the last step in the path we started down the day we were born. This race. The race born in blood and fire and the race that will die in blood and fire.</p><p>"Azrā'īl-"</p><p>"Who the hell is it?" She'd stopped with her knife.</p><p>It didn't really matter.</p><p>"Azrā'īl? Who is <em>She</em>? Death, of course-"</p><p>"But who-"</p><p>"Death's mālākh."</p><p>"An angel?" She knew the word.</p><p>"Yes! That's right. That's right. She's always there. The woman with the porcelain face who cries tears of pitch. She's always crying. She weeps for us. She knows what we are."</p><p>She knew, too.</p><p>She kissed him and then dragged Hassan to the cliff's edge, dumped him over it.</p><p>There was nothing to learn. She knew it from his eyes, the way they stayed bright and happy behind even the body's weakness.</p><p>Vladilena, Sofiya, all those names belonged to someone else. Because she'd touched Hassan, felt his skin, felt the cold alabaster under her fingers like a fine china cup. She kissed him and felt the chill on his lips.</p><p>Tasted the pitch in his tears.</p><p>The room was opulent in a way that made a mockery of the thing. Her name was Balalaika now, just like Praporshchik Boris' was forever Praporshchik.</p><p>They didn't belong to this world.</p><p>The curtains weren't stone. They were heavy red-traced purple and deadened the sound on the hardwood floors polished with so many layers it was like looking into the sea's gin-clear waters around the festering moral sinkhole in paradise they called Roanapur.</p><p>Wouldn't've surprised Balalaika to hear it was a Thai word that meant <em>hell on earth</em>.</p><p>Except what kind of Devil would want to preside over this as his dominion?</p><p>No. The dagos, the chinks, the gooks, the fucking wogs and everybody else, they swarmed over the place like it was their own private shitpile to burrow deep in and lay their eggs hatching into new perversions. They wanted money.</p><p>That was why they were there.</p><p>Hotel Moscow? That was what they called the Russian operation there. Figured they wouldn't know a simple thing like Ryazan being a day trip away from Moscow. And Afghanistan being another universe. They never came back.</p><p>It was an easy cliché for other people to say but it wasn't their cliché. No. She'd sat in her shitty cramped apartment reeking of stale air and stale water, the Olympics spat back in her eyes, huddled against the chill with newspapers caulking the window and the radiator barely giving a splutter of steam when there was steam to give.</p><p>She'd felt her body desert her. Sometimes too goddamned sick of it all to get up and take a leak. She shit her pants once just because it was too much trouble.</p><p>Stopped eating and there was nothing to shit.</p><p>The meat dropped off her bones and there was only a skeleton looking back at her Praporshchik when she opened the door and blinked through the cold gray light wreathing him like a shawl from the hallway echoing with the neighbors screaming at each other, the old drunk puking on the chipped tiled floor whose color had worn away, the soft murmurs from the Chechen family who'd come and were the only people she thought were real fucking Russians in the swirl of four-flushers and shitbirds and shitbags didn't even have the goddamn decency to fight for their country and for Socialism dead as Khrushchev.</p><p>
  <em>Kapitan, you can't keep living like this. I know a man, Kapitan. Would you like to hear what he told me?</em>
</p><p>Boris didn't wince once when he stepped into the apartment that was just a nest for the soul's disease. He sat down on a ripped-up sofa with a suspicious dark blotch and filled the room, blotted out the light.</p><p>And finally she could see. She could see when Boris smiled the smile only she rated for him. When his gigantic fingers slipped together on his knees. When he leaned over the space between them and kissed her, the kiss he said only she deserved.</p><p>
  <em>Do you remember, Kapitan? After that Algerian? What we all saw and we told each other we'd never tell anyone else we saw?</em>
</p><p>She nodded.</p><p>
  <em>I talked to Kaminski. And to Ivankov. And Dudayev. I volunteered nothing, Kapitan. I will always keep your confidences, even if you do not see fit to keep mine.</em>
</p><p>Who the fuck'd I tell, Praporshchik? Who the fuck would I tell?</p><p>
  <em>They all told me the same thing. About how She came to them in dreams. About how She made them see what they'd always known but could never admit. Has She come to you lately, Kapitan?</em>
</p><p>Yes, She had.</p><p>
  <em>She told me to listen to this man. I am going to talk to him. He's... A nobody, Kapitan. Treacherous scum. But please believe me when I tell you his weakness is our opportunity. Not like a Capitalist, but... Like a wolf scenting blood on the wind, Kapitan. This whole country, this <b>world</b> is a sick animal.</em>
</p><p>Boris' smile was sharp, a beast's filled with fangs.</p><p>
  <em>Waiting for the cull.</em>
</p><p>There was a heavy Persian rug thrown across the floor. It was the one memento she'd kept, the one she'd been meaning to bring to Uncle Semyon's grave.</p><p>No.</p><p>She'd been meaning to settle down on it and blow her brains out. She'd seen it ten thousand times. She'd be beautifully bathed, her hair trimmed, proud of all the scars striping her face. Her uniform would be immaculate, and pressed, her beret blue.</p><p>She would settle down in front of Semyon's grave, the big stone gone to rot like all the others in the overgrown yard crusted with snow and ice and powdered with poplar motes.</p><p>And she'd smile because it was a shot no one could miss.</p><p>The Persians were like the muj, like all the other believers.</p><p>Patience, for them, was life. They'd pieced together the ten million scraps of paper in the American embassy and she could see the Persians now and thousands of years ago, all the same, men and women and boys and girls, barefoot and with clean nimble fingers throwing the shuttle across their looms, one red thread, and then black, and then blue, and then gold, and it would curdle together for a generation.</p><p>And then it would be done.</p><p>It was heavy, thirty kilos.</p><p>The Jap's knees never touched it. He'd chosen a bare spot on the floor and now he was prostrating himself, head between his bracketing fingers.</p><p>She didn't wear a uniform now. She'd regrown that flesh and there wasn't as much muscle but there were the shapes Boris' strong fingers dimpled on her thighs, her calves, long and curvaceous. Her suit was like her stockings: A size tighter than her skin. Burgundy on white flesh and gray scars.</p><p>She wore her scars like the battle honors they were.</p><p>"Praporshchik? A light, please." Balailaka sat back on the sofa. It was the same one, even if nobody but she and Boris would know.</p><p>Theseus' ship in the same old bones and new meat and white leather skin.</p><p>Boris produced the lighter with a conjurer's grace. The flame licking at her cigar with the same easy elegance. The room was fragrant with a woman, with a man, with his cologne of gunpowder and her Chanel.</p><p>She wore it light. A droplet on her neck, between her tits.</p><p>The cigar was woodsmoke and burnt sugar.</p><p>She let the smoke swirl like incense. The Jap never once looked up.</p><p>"Are you still here?" The Jap had been there since the morning. Balalaika figured first she'd indulge the boy because he was cute.</p><p>And then she'd sat and stayed while the grandfather clock tucked against the dark wooden walls tick-tocked its path to noon and then the sun had started shrinking. Rush hour was every hour but the city started losing its tenuous grasp on basic traffic law at about four when everything turned into a manic crush, when the markets started emptying out, when the shadows grew long and grew teeth and the whores and thugs shrugged off their daylight slumber and shuffled out into the syrupy light you could pull like taffy.</p><p>It was hot outside. She could see it reflected in the drowsy shimmer in the air.</p><p>Too fucking hot.</p><p>The air-conditioning was soft on her skin, dry for the books, ten thousand of them or maybe more crammed creaking in a bookcase shading into darkness across the room.</p><p>"I'm not leaving." The Jap's voice was raw. She knew he'd been crying.</p><p>"Have you been crying, boy? Look at me." So he did. Tilted his head up at her. Yeah, his eyes were ringed in red and black.</p><p>"Miss Balalaika-"</p><p>"That name is not for you to touch, boy." She leaned back. Cut the cigar with her teeth. Dragged a long pull of it and let the smoke funnel out of her pink mouth. "Rock. Isn't that what you call yourself?"</p><p>"That's not for you, either, Voivoda." She didn't laugh. Boris didn't laugh, either.</p><p>"No? Why doesn't your whole body belong to me? You've thrown yourself at my mercy, after all, <em>yaponchik</em>. Walked into my castle, unarmed, without a single kopek to your name, with only that... Preposterous suit you wear.</p><p>"Your cute little teal tie and your neatly-polished shoes." She could see he'd perfected them, too. Not just polished but bulled to a deep black glow. "And for what?"</p><p>"I beg you. I beg you, Voivoda. Teach me."</p><p>"Teach you what?" She watched.</p><p>Watched the eyes.</p><p>What did Svetlana see when she unraveled the dirty strip off the traitor's eyes and gave him a firm kick in the ass and he turned around and Lena really saw him, really understood what she was doing? The graying stubble and his messy blond curls and the bruises like rotting bananas adorning his neck and his wrists and his biceps and the sweat creeping in thin ant-lines from his hairline and his narrowed eyes blinking away the summer sun's lacerating midday light.</p><p>When she told him he could live, she would tell no one, if he survived the day.</p><p>
  <em>I'll give you a twenty minute head start, traitor. That's twelve-hundred seconds. I think it's fair, don't you?</em>
</p><p>He looked back at Lena. He pleaded with his crazed lifeless blue eyes.</p><p>They'd taken leave of something.</p><p>Everything except the idiot animal need to breathe and keep doing it. Existence as an addiction, everything telescoped down to the next second.</p><p>Lena cradled an SVD in her hands. It was loaded. But Svetlana had only given her two rounds in the ten-round mag.</p><p>
  <em>One more than you should need if you're my daughter.</em>
</p><p>He fled. After six seconds Svetlana counted down, he fled, headlong first, springing with the renewed life came from thoughtless horror. An animal's dread.</p><p>Crackling through bracken. Splashing through a low runnel.</p><p>"To kill, Voivoda-"</p><p>"Then don't call me something as moronic as <em>Voivoda</em>." Balalaika laughed. So did Boris.</p><p>The boy, Rock, he just peered up at her.</p><p>"What am I supposed to call you, then? For- for God's sake-"</p><p>"God? Do you believe in God? Are you a good boy? A good Christian? Kike? Dushmani? What? What are you, Rock? What's your belief? A Catholic like the nun? An Orthodox like a Russian? What?</p><p>"Tell me." Rock said nothing. "Tell me-"</p><p>"I believe in... In Jesus. In God. I- I don't know. My parents were... Were Christians but it only really stuck for me. I don't go to church but I read my Bible." Balalaika laughed. Laughed and turned to Boris and laughed again and so did he.</p><p>"He reads his Bible, he says? What parts? The parts with the red letters?"</p><p>"I've tried. I've tried. God help me, I've..." Rock's hands stayed on the floor like he thought this was some kind of trial.</p><p>An endurance test.</p><p>"I can't. I can't forgive. I can't forgive. I <em>won't</em> forgive."</p><p>"Forgiveness is easy, Rock. Say, <em>I forgive</em>, and then forget. And after long enough passes, you will forgive." Rock said nothing for awhile. "Or won't you do that?"</p><p>"I... Dutch told me you'd say the same thing-"</p><p>"Dutch knows what he's talking about. He's a man who's never learned how to forget. Never learned how to forget anything. Listen to Dutch. He's much smarter than you, even if he is a chernomazhi."</p><p>"I don't want to be smart. I'm done with being smart. I..."</p><p>"What is it you want, Rock?"</p><p>"Blood. Death-"</p><p>"Vengeance? Is that it?" Her cigar's smoke clouded the room. Rock knew and she knew Rock knew there was nothing but her smile in the gloom. And her eyes. "Vengeance for what?"</p><p>"For this goddamned rotten world."</p><p>"Oh? Did you hear that, Praporshchik?"</p><p>"Loud and clear, Kapitan." Boris' voice sounded like thunder with elocution lessons.</p><p>"This world is a disgrace. Can't you see that? It's... It's- every fucking day, living in this goddamned city, I get it more and more. Even more. The women, the children, the... The <em>weak</em>."</p><p>"What about them? I hope you know you're talking to people who contribute to this calvary, boy-"</p><p>"Are you?" Balalaika kept smiling. "Because what I've seen is something different, Voivoda."</p><p>"Oh?"</p><p>"Money isn't your end. Death is. I... I've finally seen it. I've looked deep into something, into the dark, and it spoke back at me. I had a dream, Voivoda. I had a dream and it told me to come to you."</p><p>Balalaika leaned closer now.</p><p>Her smile at her face.</p><p>Her eyes dripped down the walls and off the ceiling.</p><p>"Really, boy?"</p><p>"I want to kill. I don't just want to do it for business, for a job, like Revy for expedience and for Eda for who the hell knows whose will. No. I mean to do it for something else. To bring the change this world needs.</p><p>"All my life, I knew. Festering in Japan. Kissing ass. Watching my soul rot in the mirror while I scrambled around for scraps, for my parents' approval, for my friends', my teachers', my bosses'. <em>Mine</em>. I was always watching myself from the outside, trying to find something to believe in about all of it.</p><p>"But there's nothing to believe in, Voivoda. This world is gone. It needs to be torn down, kicked over like a rotting house. Burned to the ground."</p><p>Balalaika was quiet for a bit. But her smile glowed through the windows and Boris' face and the books.</p><p>All of them were one. The only book anyone ever needed.</p><p>"Tell me something, boy-"</p><p>"Rock." It wasn't petulant. It sounded like he really thought it was his name now.</p><p>"Boy. And tell me honestly."</p><p>"Yes. Anything."</p><p>"Do you believe in angels?"</p>
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